Dongci is a Chinese music-oriented short video-sharing app. It currently has 2,000,000+ registered users and 200,000+ daily active users. I led user research, ideation, usability testing, and design iteration, and also contributed to prototyping.
Dongci is a Chinese music-oriented short video-sharing app launched in Jan 2018. It currently has 2,000,000 registered users and 200,000 daily active users. We aim to create online recording studios using Remix video function to make users collaborate to play music regardless of distance and time.
• Remix video function is derived from
the multi-screen video experience.
• Users can collaborate with the original
musician by adding or replacing their video
on one of the frames to create a new video.
Although Dongci found its signature features - the powerful Remix Function and multi-screen experience, it was still difficult to make users play music together. Our task was pretty straightforward, Dongci wanted more user engagement and a higher retention rate.
We created an online survey to ask 112 people what purpose for using Dongci and the top three purposes showed below. The survey showed that the main purpose of users using Dongci was to collaborate to play music.
We conducted semi-structured interviews for 20 users to make them test our current App and found their pain points. The result was that it was hard for people to complete a piece of music without professional record equipment to share and interact with their friends.
↑ Professional Users: Musicians
• Want to interact with more fans online aand offline to expand the
influence.
↑ Regular Users:
• It’s hard for them to complete a piece of music independently.
• Want more interactions with their idol.
By analyzing the current App, we surprisingly found that users tended to ignore Remix Function as a powerful opportunity to collaborate with others. Users complained that the entrance was too hidden to find and they didn’t know how to use it to start a collaboration.
We analyzed the old user flow about how users start a collaboration and found the pain points. Base on that, we ideated a new user flow to help users to start a collaboration better.
↑PROS:
• easy to implement
• works into the current flow
↑CONS:
• hidden feature, easily missed
• require user to publish unfinished work
• not flexible for multiple-user collaboration
↑PROS:
1. Support multiple-user collaboration
2. Encourage real collaboration during the process
3. Enable general users to get help to polish their work before publishing
4. Addressed the privacy concerns
↑CONS:
1. Need more effort to educate users for the new feature
Studio was a private room to enable users to collaborate at the early stage of music creation. Users could easily build a team, share work, and get feedback from friends before they posted the music in public.
Problem: Users could only interact with each other after content is fully produced. Even though they can use the remix function to collaborate, it lacks the real sense of collaboration when they are making the music.
Approach: The Team concept is introduced as one of the key element for Studio. Building a team in studio enable users to engage each other at early stage of content creation and get advised by trusted friends and musicians.
Problem: The Draft feature in Dongci is temporary with limited features. There is no ways for users to share their work in process with friends to get feedback before posting to the public.
Approach: The Track feature in Studio serves as a temporary gallery for group members to view and give feedback to each other without posting it in public.
Problem: The current users could only interact with each other under the comment sections when the music piece is posted or remix existing music work. Musicians mentioned that they have to talk and share files with collaborators in other messenger apps such as WeChat. They need a centralized place to communicate.
Approach: We aim to create a private space for users to collaborate. The Update section combines the feature of
a chatroom and new update of the group.
We did usability testing for 8 users to check if they could understand our new features. Then, we redesigned the current studio interface based on their feedback to make the studio dashboard more scalable, consistent, efficient, and flexible.
The current remix function was not significant and users even could not notice it, regardless of using it to collaborate. It disobeyed our business goal to make users hard to play music together.
Design Solutions:
• Emphasis remix function and put it on the navagation bar.
• Divide it to three parts: remix friends, remix musicians and remix events.
• Use sing-stars influence to make events and attract more users to play music and collaborate with each other.
In current remix video play mode, users had to switch the whole video if they wanted to switch a certain frame, which was not efficient. They also wanted to zoom in the specific frame which they liked it. All needs could not be satisfied with the current play mode.
Design Solutions:
• Make users zoom in the specific frame to watch more easily.
• Users can switch frames in the same video when they don't like it.
• Users can save the frame to clipboard at any time.
After usability testing, users complained about the display of lyrics. We increased the legibility of lyrics to make users follow the song easily.
↑Painpoints:
• Hard to read lyrics for low vision users
• Need more lyrics to sing
↑Solutions:
• Decrease transparency to show text better
• Add one more upcoming line of text so that users get
prepared and follow.
Changed the hierarchy of the content to highlight what users care about most. Emphasized the Remix Function to satisfy the business goal.
↑Painpoints:
• Confused about user's name.
• Refuse to follow multiple users at one time.
• Prefer to browse more videos in one page.
↑Solutions:
• Change the arrangement.
• Add "Top One" Button
• Highlight the "Remix" Function.
• Change the videos hierarchy.
After presenting our redesign proposal, we got really good feedback from the design team of Dongci, even its CEO expressed his appreciation of our ideas.
• They liked "make a post" the most and said they would take some of our solutions into consideration for their next upgrade, especially Studio.
• They also think about highlighting the Remix Function and put it in a more significant position to make people get access to it easily.
• Next, we will continue to collaborate with Developers to figure out the technical problem to see the feasibility problem and create more features.
